If We Could Go Back in Time…

If we could go back in time, WHERE would you go? And to which era?

This is a great question to ask but a terribly difficult one to answer!

Because the world of the past as we see it standing at the window of the present day, necessarily allows only certain bits and pieces to survive the decades and reach us. Some bits get lost forever, others get colored by the naive understanding of the conveyor and yet others get altered based on the personal bias of the narrator.

We never have the complete picture … and so it is easy to romanticise that past…

But let us assume that this fault of aberrant vision applies uniformly to all the various places and in all the times past. And move on to the exercise of listing places and eras that we’d like to explore.

My list, drawn up on the urgent desire to solve the mystery of that time, would be to visit Egypt at the time the pyramids were built.

Seeing them in the present moment was literally debilitating … as the questions assume soul-crushing weight when standing before the structures in real life.

Followed by the question of HOW are the many questions of WHY. WHY at many levels…

Why did they build these. Surely this will be answered when I manage that time-travel excursion.

BUT – what the question that pinches the soul … is one for more recent times…. why did we open them up and take out everything? These tombs lay in silent peace for thousands of years. And then in the last century we took that away from the dead who were revered so deeply?!

I don’t claim to understand the details… but if I had been from that era either as a subject or a king, I’d not have forgiven the people who opened up my tomb.

So, paradoxically, despite these high-moral-ground thoughts, there I was walking through the museum in Cairo, filled with items of astonishing beauty all collected from the pyramids. I walked for hours, I gasped and sighed at everything and simultaneously felt the burden of guilt and offered apologies to the very important dead that lay before me. Both feelings – the one of apology and the one of marvel were equally strong…

And in that dichotomy lies the weakness of my character.

Here are some images & videos from that unparalleled experience.

The most fascinating thing of all, were the actual mummies in the new museum in which photography was not allowed. The thing that I could not understand, was the shape of the heads of many of the kings that lay there.

In most of us, the head is approximately the shape of a cube or an oval or a vertically oriented rectangular box – all curved. In the case of many mummies I noticed that the shape was a horizontally oriented rectangular box – so the distance from front to the back was greater than the distance from the top to the bottom of the head.

What does this mean? No idea…. but this was an observation that startled me.

Maybe this shape held a brain that had capabilities that answered the first question of HOW the pyramids were built? Who knows!

If only we could travel back in time and visit them when they were alive….

jaina mishra / wovensouls.com